It is not a matter of mere chance that the conception of a “calling” or “profession” is meeting with special interest in Germany. Several books have been written on the subject, some with the intention of showing that a better understanding of the idea of a “calling” would contribute considerably toward the building up of a new and improved social order. While thus practical and political interests are debating the problem, an attempt to reach the root of the question has been made by the German sociologist, Max Weber, who in his work Protestant Ethics and the Spirit of Capitalism,1 undertook to answer the question, Why does Protestantism seem to be particularly congenial to the capitalistic type of civilization? According to him, it is the conception of a “calling” as a God-given task, developed by Luther and incorporated into Calvin's religious system, which is responsible for this fact. The word Beruf, English “calling,” itself in its present meaning, originated, he asserts, in Luther's translation of the Bible, and from that source it spread throughout the Germanic world.

El cuento septenario es de grant santidad.—Berceo, Loores 143a. There are in Berceo's verses besides the prevailing Alexandrine half-lines of seven syllables a few hemistichs of five, six, eight, nine, and even ten syllables. These may be considered as due to the alterations and mistakes of the copyist. Such is the position taken by Fitz-Gerald in his critical edition of La Vida de Santo Domingo de Silos and in his treatise on the versification of the same work. He is supported by Henríquez Ureña, who finds the regularity of Berceo quite exceptional in Old Spanish poetry, and who believes him to be the only versifier we can call correct from the Cid to D. Pero López de Ayala. Others, not finding credible this unique position of the poet, may care to see in his lines traces of the tendency to ametric verse that is supposed to have influenced all the other writers of the cuaderna vía stanza. A third position has been championed by Lang, who, remaining silent about the odd lengths other than those of eight syllables, affirms “that no convincing argument has as yet been advanced against the thesis that Gonzalo de Berceo admitted the native octosyllable quite as much as the other authors of the cuaderna vía.”

It is increasingly the tendency of Beowulf students to stress the importance of the historical passages of the poem. Since Grundtvig established the date of Hygelac's last raid, one is inclined to expect corroboration of other parts of the narrative. But the extent to which one may reasonably accept the poet's statements is a matter for dispute. When he says that Beowulf was present at the last raid of Hygelac, there is no reason for doubt. Not so when he says that the hero swam off with thirty suits of armor. When the swimming match with Breca is mentioned, one may reasonably suppose that the hero distinguished himself in a swimming contest in his youth. But when he swims for days and fights off all manner of uncouth beasts, there seems to be sufficient grounds for skepticism. Or when Beowulf, filled with years dies fighting the dragon, we may feel sure that he died a violent death, without accepting the existence of dragons in the sixth century. Thus in general, we may limit confidence to simple facts simply asserted.

The date of the writing of the Secunda Pastorum and, ipso facto, of the flourishing of the “Wakefield Master,” has been variously given from “the fourteenth century or even earlier” to “the reign of Henry VI or Edward IV” the more usual dates centering about Wat Tyler's Rebellion, 1381, or the first decade of the fifteenth century. The basis of these widely differing datings has been found in the implications of various social allusions in the plays, and one of these allusions, that to horned head-dress, has been used very diversely. This fact, coupled with the fact that Professor Oscar Cargill has claimed that “there seem to be no allusions in the (Wakefield) cycle which may positively refer to any events after 1355,” led me to undertake the present study. As a result I am here proposing a date definitely later than the ones commonly chosen and advocated. Let us turn first to the evidence offered by the costume passages in the plays.

Probably the chief reason for many of the linguistic irregularities of Old Northumbrian is the fact that the great bulk (about 98 per cent) of its literary remains exist in the form of glosses, in which a scribe is often so intent upon conveying the general meaning of a concept in the Latin parallel that he lets the outer dressing of the vernacular—the grammatical or syntactic form, even the spelling, of a word—take care of itself. The fact, however, that these glosses may be in consequence entirely untrustworthy as a basis for an acceptance or a rejection of linguistic rules need not detract from the interest that their anomalies may happen to afford us. Thus, in a recent survey of Northumbrian relics to observe the treatment therein of the instrumental case, there appeared no fewer than ten constructions which have not as yet been recorded in any systematic study of Old English case-syntax as a whole.

By the end of the fourteenth century the institution of chivalry seemed more brilliant than ever before. It had covered itself with glory during the long years of the struggle between France and England, numbering among its heroes such exemplars of knighthood as the Black Prince and King John of France, Sir John Chandos and Bertrand du Guesclin. During the lull that occurred in the last years of the century, monarchs and princes, freed from the galling restrictions of war, vied with one another in the great mediæval pageant, the tournament; court life under the youthful Charles VI in extravagant reaction to the bourgeois régime of Charles le Sage, was once more aristocratic and magnificent; knights rode gaily forth on expeditions against the infidels or wandered off to foreign lands to join in jousts and tourneys.

The Conflict of Conscience, a morality play by Nathaniel Wood, was printed in London, 1581, in a black-letter quarto. This is the only known edition of the work; it appeared, however, in two issues. The first of these gives the name of “Frauncis Spera” on the title-page and in the Prologue, and at the end of the piece the Nuntius announces that Philologus, the character representing the Italian, Francesco Spiera, had committed suicide. The second issue does not mention the name of the historical prototype of the chief character in the drama, and in it the Nuntius announces that Philologus had been reconverted to Protestantism before his death.

A recent study of Peire d'Alvernhe's Chantarai d'aquest trobadors identified one “Guossalbo Roitz” ridiculed by Peire with a certain Spanish nobleman named Gonçalvo Roiz, showed that this man had been in or near Puivert (Aude), where Peire's satire was written, in the summer of 1170, and proposed that the brilliant cortège with which he was travelling had attracted to that spot the troubadours of Peire's satire. Since this group of nobles was going into Aragon escorting Eleanor, the daughter of Henry II of England, to her wedding with Alfonso VIII of Castile, it suggested the possibility that at least some of the troubadours of the satire were attached to the bride's suite.

Literary endeavor in the Middle Ages, as in the Renaissance, was essentially an art of imitation. Since little emphasis was placed upon originality of subject-matter, since praise went rather to the combination and interpretation of familiar materials—or to stylistic qualities —the author felt free to appropriate whatever themes or episodes best suited his fundamental conception. Thus an Arthurian romance was usually a tissue of commonplace incidents and motifs, developed in accordance with the purpose or the taste of the individual writer. To distinguish between the narrative content of a work and the particular interpretation applied to it by the artist, the Middle Ages employed the terms matière and sens. The matière might come from any source; the sens alone was the contribution of the latest reworker.

Thomas Deloney's four novels are generally praised for their vigor of style and their realism. Indeed, his modern editor, Mr. F. O. Mann, in singling out for commendation “his faithful and sympathetic rendering of commonplace human life,” insists that in Deloney is to be found “the highest achievement of the Elizabethan novel.” Not infrequently, however, Deloney's “commonplace human life” yields to high-flown and altogether improbable romances of earls and ladies, princes and princesses, kings and queens, just as his ordinary familiar prose style at times is embellished with all the euphuistic tricks he was capable of imitating. In particular his apparently casual references to strange birds, queer beasts, and other wonders of nature and to historical and mythological characters give a surprising air of learning; and the notes of his various editors suggest that he was acquainted with such authors as Boccaccio, Belieforest, Pliny, Sextus Empiricus, and Cornelius Nepos.

In British Museum Addit. MS. 34360 on folio 22 occurs one stanza of rime royal entitled “The question of halsam.” It is smooth in meter, well-balanced in thought, and practically perfect in stanza form, comparing very favorably in these respects with other minor lyrics of the early fifteenth century. The popularity of this poem is attested by its presence in many manuscripts of that century and by the fact that Caxton printed it together with a second seven-line stanza also ascribed to Halsham. Both of these lyrics are found in Bodley 3896, f. 195a (MS. Fairfax 16), which affords not only the earliest, but the most authentic text of these pieces:

The worlde so wide / thaire so remuable
The sely man / so litel of stature
The grove and grounde / of clothinge so mutable
The fire so hoote / and subtil of nature
The water neuer in oon / what creature
That made is of these foure / thus flyttyng
May stedfast be as here / in his lyving

The more I goo / the ferther I am behinde
The ferther behinde / the ner my wayes ende
The more I seche / þe worse kan I fynde
The lighter leve / the lother for to wende
The bet y serve / the more al out of mynde
Is thys ffortune not I / or infortune
Though I go lowse / tyed am I with a Lune

There exist in Old English a number of compilations in which an address of the soul to its body is a conspicuous feature. The best known is the poem in the Vercelli and the Exeter Books, in which the soul returns to its body once a week and communes with it, the sinful soul reproaching it vituperatively, the righteous comforting it lovingly and joyously. The fourth Vercelli homily has a remarkable scene, an elaborated account of the judgement of the soul at Doomsday, in which the souls address their bodies as they stand in the presence of the Judge. The Last Judgement is again the scene of an address, and that in one of the homilies presented by Assmann. There is, finally, the Old English vision, printed by Thorpe and Napier, of the bringing forth of the soul, wherein the newly-released soul of a sinner vituperates the body it has just left. To this literature, I wish to add passages from two unpublished Old English homilies, in which the address is made, not at the moment of death, as in Thorpe and Napier, nor at the Last Judgement, as in Vercelli Homily iv and in Assmann, but at some intermediate time, when the soul returns intermittently to its body for that purpose, as in the Old English poem. These two texts are Homilies ii and iv of MS. Junius 85 of the Bodleian Library, and Homily xl of MS. Ii. 1.33 of the Cambridge University Library.

On Several occasions the present writer would have found a list of play manuscripts dating from 1558 to 1700 a convenience while working in the field. These manuscripts, impressive in number and in the possibilities for study which they offer, have never been catalogued with the care which has been lavished upon play publications. The manuscripts listed in Appendix N of E. K. Chambers' Elizabethan Stage are limited to those of plays provedly composed before 1616; and the notes concerning manuscripts interspersed in W. C. Hazlitt's Manual for the Collector and Amateur of Old English Plays are incomplete and frequently vague. The list of manuscripts which follows has been compiled after a reëxamination of the catalogues of museums and university libraries, and application by mail to the curators of such collections as those at the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Huntington Library and Art Gallery. Exhaustiveness is not claimed; but the lists already existing are considerably supplemented, and in a number of instances it has been possible to supply the precise location of manuscripts which were known but unlocated by Chambers or which have changed ownership since the time of Hazlitt.

It is remarkable that the one possibly contemporary statement in regard to the authorship of Piers Plowman has never been adequately examined. That is the note in the Trinity College Dublin MS. D, 4, I (Skeat's No. XLI, C-text), to the effect that the author was William Langland, the son of a gentleman, Stacy de Rokayle, who lived in Shipton-under-Wychwood as a tenant of Lord le Spenser in the County of Oxford:

Some time during the first half of the fifteenth century there came into being a new type of sonnet the existence of which writers of Italian manuals of versification have either overlooked, ignored, looked upon as an isolated phenomenon, or connected with other devices that bear to it but a remote historical relationship. The most immediate model of this new form is the sonetto equivoco—a favorite artifice from the first century of Italian literature to the end of the Trecento—in which the rime equivoche of the simple variety are extended to all of the fourteen verses. Petrarch's Quand'io son tutto … is the best known example of a sonnet with equivocal rime words.

No definite agreement concerning the probable date of the Eneas exists in the studies devoted to this mediæval romance. Its editor, M. Salverda de Grave, originally placed the Eneas at about 1150, M. Faral believes it was composed about 1160, and one of its most recent critics, Mr. F. Guyer, considers it somewhat anterior to the year 1174. The last date can hardly be accepted, however, since the major part of Heinrich von Veldeke's translation of the Eneas into German was completed by 1175, and it seems reasonable to assume that the poem's dissemination and translation would require more than one year.